Patience is a supreme virtue where electronics are concerned. We patiently endured a free but ancient wintel POS but it finally died; we ditched it in favor of a 17″ MacBook Pro with the i7 chip running at 266 GHz and 8GB of RAM.
The new beastie arrived yesterday, and it’s smokin’ fast. I can run MS Excel, be copying several gigabytes of files in the background, be streaming di.fm in one window and running a crystal-clear HD Youtube video in another, and there’s no skipping, no hesitation, nothing of the sort.
As of last week, if I wanted to play a video without multi-second pauses, I had to kill off every other application running.
This thing should last us four or five years. I’m quite pleased with it — Apple’s packaging, attention to detail and sheer user-friendliness are just as good, if not better, than I remembered from my last Mac, a Powerbook 180c that lasted me through law school and for a half-decade beyond.
The WordPress posting interface is a bit different, in Safari, though — can’t yet figure out where the little toolbar went to. On the other hand, I should be able to organize all of my Boomershoot photos lightning-quick and start posting them again, for example. A single photo would take minutes to load on the old machine; now they’re instantaneous.
Congrats on the new MacBook! It’ll certainly last you a good, long time. I’m still running my G4/800mhz iMac (the ones that looked like a lamp) which I bought in the fall of 2002! It still works fine for web surfing and email (I’m typing up this comment on it) as well as word processing/spreadsheets, etc. The only thing it can’t keep up with is multimedia. Since then I’ve picked up a PowerBook and a MacMini and love them all.
BTW, I read the followup post to this one first, and I find it amusing how often you hear that type of response from PC people when you tell them you bought a Mac. They sound almost jealous :-). It’d be like a guy who’s still driving his 1985 Chevy Cavalier (on it’s third engine) acting astonished that his neighbor bought a new Hyundai instead of buying an old Cavalier. I don’t get it.
Does it have a 1T drive? I have a $799 quad-core machine from Costco with all that pushing a 32-inch screen at 1920×1200 in 32-bit color. 🙂 I just couldn’t ever buy a Mac, Steve lives down the street from my folks – he’s a poser-kid from Sunnyvale, but Shallow Alto isn’t the same anymore, either.
That all sounds really neat. If I were at all concerned with that stuff, I might even be impressed. All I know is that 1) my Macs hold all my files, with plenty of room to spare 2) NEVER crash and 3) will outlast any PC owned by any person that I know.
To each his own, I suppose. I still can’t get my own father to quit wasting his money on HP’s… 🙂
“how often you hear that type of response from PC people when you tell them you bought a Mac. They sound almost jealous :-)”
I’m old enough to remember the days when Macs zealots would go to enormous lengths to find the one test in one application that a mac would run 0.0001uS faster than commodity PC hardware in an effort to justify the enormous sums of money they spent on their Mac.
I can honestly say that I’m happy for Apple fans that they no longer have to make excuses for their hardware.
D.W., your analogy is atrocious.
A more correct analogy would be this: One guy buys a mid-level model Lexus E-series and says his car is “better” than the guy who spent 20% less on a top of the line Camry.
Who is getting more for their money and who is the badge whore?
Cultists.
Ditch Safari and go with FireFox. Safari is mostly brain-dead.